Virtual Healing

I’d like to call in a favour today please, my gorgeous reader.

If you’ve been following my little adventures via the blog you’ll know that my beautiful fur-baby hasn’t been very well recently. It’s been over a month, and rather than improving, he’s been deteriorating. So tomorrow he goes into fur-baby hospital, where they’ll do ultrasounds and x-rays and endoscopies and try to work out what exactly is going on inside his little tummy that’s causing him such big problems.

As the situation has gone on, I’ve become a bit of a stress bucket these last few weeks. The more my pooch has suffered, the more my stress levels have increased. Completely normal and understandable, I hear you say. Well, yes, I guess it is. But (and it’s a big but – ha!) – it’s not helpful to me or to the pooch.

The more I stress, the more I focus on all sorts of ‘worst case’ scenarios. And of course that just makes me feel worse than I did before. Not only that, the pooch has his own little ‘feelings’ antennae and can pick up on my stress, so I’m not helping him either. Which means neither of us is getting much sleep or rest at the moment. We’re waking up tired, which is a great recipe for the stress snowball effect to continue.

The worst thing is, I know better. As part of my NLP training, I learned how the brain thinks in pictures and feelings. I learned how the brain doesn’t distinguish between real and imagined, so of course it reacts to my imagined scenarios in the same way as it does the real ones, causing me just as much anguish and as many tears as if it had actually happened. Virtual scenario, but real pain.

I know that the best way for me to cope is to stop wallowing in virtual pain and to start thinking about what it’ll be like to see the pooch eating properly, sleeping well, rolling around in the grass in his usual flamboyant, inelegant, joyful style. It’s virtual healing – the more I replay that picture of the pooch at play, having fun in the sun, the more happy hormones will kick in for me, and the better I’ll feel. The better I feel, the better I’ll be able to cope. The better I’m able to cope, the more use I’ll be to the pooch.

So here’s where I’d like to ask for the favour – can you help me and the pooch please? If you have a minute to spare, can you also imagine my pooch rolling around in the grass, under the warmth of the sun, having a good old time. I’m sure that the more good health vibes we can send his way, the quicker his recovery will be. A different but just as important style of virtual healing 🙂

And I’m going to ask you for one more favour – I want you to help yourself too. If there’s something you’re struggling with right now, big or small, I want you to take five minutes to imagine what the best outcome would be for you. Imagine what you would see, what words you might hear, what smells might be wafting your way, and how all of this would make you feel.

Let’s practice our virtual healing together and make our little corner of the world a stronger, healthier, happier place.